Wednesday, January 30, 2013

STILL MORE ANNALS OF THE CULTURE WARS.

If conservatives are going to be in the popular culture – and act to change it – they can’t simply ignore shows like Girls that capture the zeitgeist, even if the zeitgeist makes their skin crawl. Season two is well under way, and conservatives need to participate in the discussion.

And what sort of discussion would that be?

Think of Sex and the City, except Sarah Jessica Parker has doubled her weight, dresses like a potato sack and fancies herself the voice of some undefined generation.

Oh, that kind. I expect there's at least one clubhouse or klavern in every county where that discussion never ends.

But wait, Schlichter wants to directly engage the sheeple:

You can’t talk about Girls at the water cooler with the rest of the office if you haven’t watched it, and if you aren’t part of the discussion you aren’t injecting and modeling the conservative ideas and values that we need to advance. You can['t] criticize and critique if you’re AWOL from pop culture.

So, someone's going to say "Hey, did you see Girls last night?" and you're going to say -- let me take a line from Schlichter's essay -- "The characters seem to live in a minority and Republican-free bubble (though a black Republican (!) shows up as a character this season). There is no reference to religion – that wouldn't occur to them." Or, even better, try one from Jeffrey Lord at The American Spectator:

The America that leftist women have such contempt for... that America is sending its sons and daughters to protect those rights. To die for those rights.

It is exactly that America that sent Tyrone Woods to fight Ansar al-Sharia in Benghazi so that Lena Dunham can sit at peace in Brooklyn with her tattoo and her sleeveless T-shirt and her wink-wink on-camera prattlings about first-times. So that Amanda Marcotte can play with her race cards at Slate.

We’ll know we’re winning when we see the conservative equivalent of Girls.

How about just watching PornTube and declaring victory?

Their big problem is neatly encapsulated in this bit:

What can be puzzling is trying to figure out how Dunham actually feels about her characters – does she really understand how deluded and shallow they are, or does she (horrors) consider them as some sort of role models for her co-generationists?

I wonder if they'll ever realize that their real culture war is not with liberals, but with ambiguity.

UPDATE. Right out of the gate, commenter Spaghetti Lee:

We’ll know we’re winning when we see the conservative equivalent of Girls.

Lena Dunham really hit a nerve with the mild innuendo of that Obama ad. And make no mistake, from someone who has both written and spoken the line "You seem like you want to come on my tits" that was pretty damn mild. But it's also obvious why it hit a nerve. They had no answer for it. She pointed out that the Republicans are giving women no reason to vote for them beyond "my husband said so", and - o the unfairness! - that's just not enough.

The characters on Girls, from the episodes I've seen, can certainly be aggravating, but they signify a young generation to whom Schlicter's line has no appeal. They're the wrong kind of selfish.

"doubled her weight, dresses like a potato sack..."So the "conservative" view of women is that they should be fashion-obsessed anorexics. I wonder how that goes over with the Promise-Keeper / Purity Ball / Quiverfull crowd where women are supposed to eschew vanity. Oh wait, I forgot about wingnut cognitive dissonance...

If conservatives want to understand culture and entertainment, they might want to start by acknowledging that culture and entertainment exist. Based on these essays, these guys turn on their TVs and see only partisan politics in different shapes.

Lena Dunham can sit at peace in Brooklyn with her tattoo and her sleeveless T-shirt and her wink-wink on-camera

I haven't seen this much sexual resentment since they scheduled the Mormon businessmen's conference and the NFL Cheerleader of the Year dinner at the same hotel.

BTW, this is pretty much the perfect example of "culture war = war on culture" idea. Treating some damn TV show like it's a military campaign. "How can we take this thing and twist it so that it does nothing but suit our political interests?" Weirdos.

"fancies herself the voice of some undefined generation." Isn't that the pot calling the kettle black?

I don't get it...if they "change" popular culture and turn it into the conservative version then it will no longer be popular culture, right? Also, why are they copying everything "even if the zeitgeist makes their skin crawl": wikipedia/conservapedia, Girls/conservative Girls, DailyShow/The 1/2 Hour News Hour, etc. If conservative everything is so much better why can't they come up with something original that appeals to a wider audience than their base? As it is their conservative clones are all fail.

Instead of facing questions of morality, the characters face questions of behavior along the lines Seinfeld parodied – who has “hand” in a relationship, or the social faux pas of the “close talker.” To put it bluntly, these are not the big questions that the great thinkers of Western civilization have pondered over the centuries.

Unlike, say, Petticoat Junction, which addressed questions of Realpolitik in a manner so subtle and sophisticated as to make the Melian Dialogue look like a farting contest between two exceptionally dimwitted kindergarteners.

I'd also like to note in passing that Schlichter's model for conservative participation in the discussion about Girls appears to consist largely of complaining that Lena Dunham is a repulsively unfuckable lipodemon from Obesity Dimension XXL and asking why she can't be more like that nice Claire Danes girl - i.e., skinny and blonde. Truly, we are living in an age of insightful, cogent conservative criticism of the arts rivaled only by the era of Eliot and The Criterion.

It is exactly that America that sent Tyrone Woods to fight Ansar al-Sharia in Benghazi so that Lena Dunham can sit at peace in Brooklyn with her tattoo and her sleeveless T-shirt and her wink-wink on-camera prattlings about first-times. So that Amanda Marcotte can play with her race cards at Slate.,/i>

Oh, and following up on my remark, I have to say - the kind of person who thinks his role in life is to show up at water-cooler discussions about TV shows to "inject and model [political] ideas and values we need to advance" is bound to be exactly the kind of person everyone in the office runs screaming from, regardless of his politics.

I'm liberal as hell, but I'd never in a million years assume that my discussions with my office mates about a TV show was an opportunity to model my political philosophy to them. Kee-rist, these people have a laughably high opinion of their importance in life.

Also note that the silly, lite innuendos of her ad are "tacky" and something she should be embarrassed about for her future children*... while "joking" that Dunham is unfuckably fat is a-okay. Good luck with that lady outreach, brah.

* I'm reminded of the single best line from Roseanne, when one of her kids calls her out for making a sex joke: "you kids are our little sex jokes."

It never gets old. Some Konservative Kulture warrior drawing up designs from back at headquarters on how to outflank the liberal vietcong and all they can offer as an example to the boys on the front line is the equivalent of Bud Fox's three point plan to revamp Blue Star. It's better than Spy magazine.

One of the creepy, old-before-his-time interns at the american conservative had a post last week about how the characters on girls don't seem happy, therefore the show is a secret refutation of the sexual refutation.

They cannot enjoy something unless it confirms their weirdgross prejudices.

Dude, these people are like the aliens in Galaxy Quest puzzling over "historical documents". They don't understand fiction, or storytelling, or even entertainment. Their idea of a stirring tale would be a heroic young Marine back from the wars, who returns to find his younger brother struggling with homosexual urges. The Marine takes his brother to church! They pray! The Marine finds the chickenhawk assistant guidance counselor who told the brother that being gay wasn't so bad if you moved to the city, and beats him bloody, because he's a liberal fag-lover! Everybody goes to church! They pray! The women cast their eyes downward and smile, but don't show their teeth! The top marginal tax rate is cut to 25%! The end!

Conservatives should ask themselves why Fox (not news) channel has the best "liberal" shows? Why O Why doesn't Murdoch have Fox make "conservative" shows that everyone will love, and quote ad nauseam, like they do "The Simpsons" and.... so many others.

Because if it's good or popular it's actually conservative. The Simpsons are conservative because Homer and Marge are opposite married. American Idol is conservative because there is no coöperating, only a struggle to dominate, and it had American right there in the title.

... a-a-and then the Marine recruits his kid brother and they all go off to Boot Camp and they're surrounded by thousands of hard muscular young men stripped to the waist showing their glistening muscles as they do push-ups and then they grab huge thick ropes in their strong hands and then they're at the range with their assault weapons and they're holding on to those long steel-hard barrels and suddenly POW! KA-POW POW! And then they're off duty and go beat up a faggot.

It is exactly that America that sent Tyrone Woods to fight Ansar al-Sharia in Benghazi so that Lena Dunham can sit at peace in Brooklyn with her tattoo and her sleeveless T-shirt and her wink-wink on-camera prattlings about first-times. So that Amanda Marcotte can play with her race cards at Slate.

Someone died in Libya so it is outrageous that other people are doing things that we don't like.

Contra Jeffrey Lord, I suspect that the reasons for sending Tyrone Woods to Benghazi had little to do with Lena Dunham's wardrobe or Amanda Marcotte's polemic.

Think of Sex and the City, except Sarah Jessica Parker has doubled her weight, dresses like a potato sack and fancies herself the voice of some undefined generation.Winning teh wimmins over, one insult at at time... actually, that's three insults in one sentence.

In '97 I bought a tv and watched it because I didn't know what anyone in the corporate store where I worked was talking about. I didn't feel like I was missing anything so sold it. Now I watch television shows streaming and quite a few of them have more writing talent than most movies these days. I'm thinking television reception/cable might be worth it now.

Reading through the comments over there it appears that a lot of them have stopped suscribing to cable. If that's widespread, you know what that means? More good shows that will piss them off and a few idiot wing-nuts forcing themselves to watch them for us to ridicule!

"It is exactly that America that sent Tyrone Woods to fight Ansar al-Sharia in Benghazi so that Lena Dunham can sit at peace in Brooklyn..."

Ummm, isn't that pretty much the official justification for the military and its overseas adventures; so the rest of us can sit at peace at home and enjoy our constitutional freedoms? Sending Tyrone Woods to fight for cheap oil so that rich assholes can drive around in Mercedes and fling shit at young women may actually be more realistic, but somehow it jjust doesn't have quite the same ring to it.

Jeffrey Lord: Say, you know, this is some swinging singles apartment building Rec Room! You could have here many good swinging times! Which you would enjoy a great deal!

Kurt Schlichter: It's so thought out and together!

Jeffrey Lord: Look at you swinging girls, having such a good time, enjoying yourselves here and now!

Kurt Schlichter: Don't mention it!

Jeffrey Lord: My friend and I are from CPAC, even though no one can tell. We came here during the riot that always happens when Coulter speaks. We ran from it to come to Brooklyn, where your poisonous, feminazi television show is filmed to learn to speak about the black Republicans and the sleeve tattoo to our unsuspecting liberal neighbors in DuPont Circle, but, boy, we gave up many things. Among the National Reviews and Breitbarts and American Spectators, we are having cushy sinecures to write about championing conservative values like a flat tax and no abortions for whores like you in the television and also the video games - but here in Brooklyn we must be salesman for decorative bathroom fixtures. In the CPAC, we are thoughtful conservative activists!

"The America that leftist women have such contempt for... that America is sending its sons and daughters to protect those rights. To die for those rights.

"It is exactly that America that sent Tyrone Woods to fight Ansar al-Sharia in Benghazi so that Lena Dunham can sit at peace in Brooklyn with her tattoo and her sleeveless T-shirt and her wink-wink on-camera prattlings about first-times."

Well, now I know what really killed Yuri Andropov. It was the sight of young Soviet citizens walking around in capitalist Levis while good socialist Soviet boys were defending their right not to do so in Afghanistan.

Lord Jeffrey is such a wanker. Leave it to a guy that avoided the military to suddenly know all about how the military is protecting our rights. Well, Lord J., in my experience--which does include three Vietnam-era years' worth of gnawing at the ankles of brown-shoe army sergeant majors--the military hates our freedoms and thinks civilians are creeps for exercising those "unpatriotic" rights like freedom of speech and freedom of assembly and especially that one about petitioning the government in redress of grievances. The military dislikes it enough, Jeffrey old boy, to spy on citizens when they're doing those things.

Not that an idiot like Lord Jeffrey would notice, but the military is mostly interested in vacuuming up tax dollars, not defending Lena Dunham's rights.

Here we have young Jeffrey fulminating against popular culture and the slough of taste in which the masses can enjoy such trash.

Also on his side: Dinesh D'Souza, who finds contemporary America to be so lost in decadence that he sympathises with the Islamic extremists who want to destroy it. Ramesh Ponnuru and his 'Culture of Death;. Bob Owens who dreams of an al-Qaeda-inspired insurgency against American cities...

Originally posted over at SteveM's and reposted here for topicality. I admit there's not enough snark in it but y'all can tinker a bit around the edges.

We Stoop To Conquer--NRO division.

by aimai

From the NRO mailer that lands in my in box periodically comes this amazing bit of garbled thinking. Obama won voters that no self respecting Democrat would ever have gone for--people who love JayZ, atheists, young women, non white people, people who wouldn't know a political issue like the debt if it jumped up and bit them! That's how low Obama was willing to go--he even tried to appeal to voters who previous politicians as evil as Al Gore and John Kerry refused to appeal to. How low is that? So low that after excoriating Obama and his voters NRO decides that if you can't beat 'em you'd better join 'em.

What cultural markers is the Republican brand associated with? Two things come to mind, the aspects of life that Obama said rural Pennsylvanians cling to, guns and religion. And those are pretty good ones; the country is full of people who take religion seriously and there are a lot of people who enjoy their right to own a firearm, for reasons ranging from hunting to sport shooting to collecting to self-defense. But as we've seen, that's not enough to get a majority of the popular vote or 270 electoral votes, and there are some pretty big swaths of the country -- mostly the West Coast and Northeast -- where those indicators either don't help us or work against us.So, thinking of new cultural traits the GOP could attempt to adopt as some of their trademarks, just off the top of my head . . . [ellipses in the original]

Foodies? There are a lot of folks who are passionately interested in food, in a way there just weren't a generation ago. (See Vic Matus's great article from a while back on the rise of celebrity chefs.) Why can't the GOP be the Foodie Party, the one that fights moronic dietary laws like Bloomberg's ban on 20 ounce sodas, California's idiotic foie gras ban, the ludicrous talk of the Food and Drug Administration putting even more stringent regulations on raw-milk cheeses on top of the existing ones. (For Pete's sake, slap a warning label on it letting people know about the risk of raw-milk cheeses.) We ought to be standing up to the Nanny State, and making the case that grown adults who we entrust with a right to vote, a right to own a gun, and a right to speak their minds ought to have the right to eat whatever they want.

College-Age Drinkers: Propose lowering the drinking age to 18, on the argument that you'll see less binge drinking on college campuses if 18-, 19-, and 20-year-olds can just go into a bar or restaurant and order a beer. If you're really worried about lowering the drinking age across the board, make it legal for those between 18 and 21 to consume alcohol in a licensed establishment, so that a bartender or server could cut them off if there are signs of dangerous intoxication.I guarantee this would make the College Republicans a heck of a lot more popular on campus. Speaking of which . . .The beauty of it all is that when Obama appeals to voters the NRO represents it as a bribe, when the NRO does it its merely some kind of ...inducement?

This horrible commenting system doesn't allow me to block quote or even use italics!!!! All that is left to me is the shift key and some random exclamation points. I realize that you guys will probably not be able to tell where parody leaves off and reality begins (to misquote my favorite line from Moby Dick) so *the actual NRO piece begins right at the beachead with the phrase:

Forgive me if this has been pointed out already, but isn't the whole fucking purpose of conservative attack on modern society, especially on the public education system and heroic teachers, that they MUST keep their (physical, emotional and mental) young'uns away from any hint of liberal ideology?

How can simple-minded--excuse me, "morally clear-headed" wingnuts intentionally expose themselves to creepy liberal stuff and not get contaminated? As in, "how are you gonna keep 'em down on the farm once they've seen gay Paree?"

This reminds me of the irritating fact that the same people who reared back in horror at Jeremiah Wright's hypothetical "[Then] God damn America" were simultaneously explaining to us that God himself was damning America through various and sundry plagues, floods, and terrorist acts. It was like an infinite regression of Jeremiads on the sorry state of America's relationship with God as exemplified in some other guy's Jeremiad on the sorry state of America's relationship with God.

Exactly. You can just imagine the office hobgoblin popping up with a smirk when a couple of co-workers happen to be in the break room, nuking their lunches and talking about the previous night's episode: "Hey, I watched that Girls show once. That Leda Durham sure dresses like a potato sack, doesn't she?" Followed by uncomfortable silence and a soon-as-possible exit, chased by his asking the one that he has a crush on if she'd seen his pictures from the gun show that he posted on his FB page.

Marcotte had a piece where she explains some of the game. Sexually active women aren't virtuous, so their opinions don't count. Young virgins are still to unlearned in the way the world works for their opinions to count. Old crones are old and icky, lacking the grace of beauty, so their opinions don't count.

You can see it active in Lord's comments. Dunham doesn't count because she has sex and she isn't attractive.

It's not that difficult "trying to figure out how Dunham actually feels about her characters" as she's all over the place promoting the show and talking about how she feels about her characters. It's just more fun to make stuff up.

It reads better if you don't know where the shift comes. The foodies thing, kind of clever, then the college drinking and you think, hey, wait a minute. The next one was going to be building up bonds with the sexually brutal.

Oh, those bonds were never broken--look at how quickly they deep sixed the (Anti) Violence Against Women Act. The only difference between the most rabid MRA sites and the modern Republican party is that the modern Republican party at least pays lip service to the belief that some women are Madonnas even while treating all women as whores. The MRA's don't even believe that.

BBB - imagine my relief on scrolling yr link and seeing it was about Jim Nabors. My first thought was Lee Harvey Oswald or Charles Whitman. Okay - not country boys, but 'the South', 'USMC'...you see where I'm headed.

If she doesn't hate her characters for being, shallow, sex obsessed, and dressed "like a potato sack" then I think her feelings are going to be dismissed as, basically, wrong. Whether that is because they think that all popular culture should be didactic, like a horn book for the horny, or because they think everyone covers their basically evil nature by enacting Condemnation as a public show is unclear. But remember these are the same people who used to read Playboy for the articles and now watch youtubes of gay pride parades as "research."

Four; I remember the days when Sex and the City was a byword for irresponsible hedonism and mass-market vulgarity, to be abused by all intellectually respectable people as no TV series ever was abused before or since. Some people just don't want independent young single women in their entertainment.

Honestly, I find Lena Dunham somehow slightly grating, and encounter enough artisanal mayonnaise-crafting hipsters in real life without subscribing to HBO. Do I have to turn in my "Proud Liberal" suspenders now? Oh, wait, no, I'm on the side** that acknowledges that cultural tastes and preferences exist independently of polemical political tribalism. Whew.

**Yes, I'm self-identifying with a side that is aware that it's not always about sides. Ironic, isn't it? Now where did I put that jar of mayo?

Slightly OT: re conservatards insistence that if everyone was armed there would be less shootin'. Someone should advise them to watch one of those non-Leftwing-propaganda movies or TV shows often referred to as "Westerns". Lotta shootin' going on in them.

Bingo. I've made this argument myself before. I mean, I definitely think shows like "Will and Grace" normalized homosexual friendships/relationships/people to a certain extent, but the fact is that America was ready to let "W&G" into their homes. Did the average person give as shit that there was a show about two gay dudes and their best friends on TV? No.

To be scrupulously fair to Schlichter, Dunham's character apparently says "I may be the voice of my generation. Or at least a voice of a generation" at some point. I think she was making a joke of some sort, though.

"What can be puzzling is trying to figure out how Dunham actually feels about her characters – does she really understand how deluded and shallow they are, or does she (horrors) consider them as some sort of role models for her co-generationists?"

I imagine she feels about them the way most comedy writers feel about the characters they create--that they are funny and flawed. Really, really flawed. It's where the comedy comes in, folks.

If I thought there was even a shred of a chance they'd ever pay any money, ever, to anyone except themselves, I might actually turn out something and shop it to them, because it's hard to imagine anything more satisfying than taking an asshole's money away from him. Here's the arguments against doing that:

1. It would be morally repugnant. Not as morally repugnant as writing climate change denialist articles for Exxon, but still not really a positive thing.

2. Declaration Entertainment, and people like them, won't buy a script. They'll try to get it for points, and probably points of net, not gross. So the writer wouldn't get paid until the thing got made and showed a profit. HA HA HA HA.

3. Head on over to their site and find the trailer for "The Arroyo", and tell me what you think about the production values. They've had almost six months to work on the film since they released that trailer, but they're not talking about progress. The video's nice, but with cameras under $1000 that's the cheapest part nowadays. The sound's not good. There's a heavy with what looks like a single henchman. The characters aren't introduced. It's the best ninety seconds of footage they made, and after you've seen it, you don't need to see the movie. That's the kind of "storytellers" they are.

These people don't seem to grasp that conservatism is, by definition, well.... um, conservative, and therefore it is never going to be a reliable source of the excitement and entertainment people crave. They're never going to win this one.

Everyone knows that Tyrone Woods specifically chose to join the military to make sure tax rates on those making over $250,000 a year were not raised, that gays could not get married, GE's stock price remained high, abortion banned (for the poors) and that every bankster on Wall Street could swim peacefully in his money vault.

And why, pray tell, are is culture mumble, mumble brigade of wingnuttery not studying what Felicia Day did to make The Guild and posting a sitcom about four young conservative dudes working at the American Enterprise Institute and looking for love in the big city every week at Breitbart.com? I guess because that would involve a fair amount of work and they're not really delusional enough to think anyone wants to watch that, much as they might pretend otherwise in print.

Injecting-schmeckting. "Modeling"? (That nanny-state term for inculcating in our virile American youth the feminizing values of political correctness...) How does he intend to "model conservative ideas" by gabbing about Girls at the water cooler? Oh, right--

"See what I'm doing, my fellow Americans? By chatting instructively about the corrupt morality of Girls, I'm embodying and demonstrating the conservative principle of protecting freedom by correcting your faulty conception of it."

Agree, but you can mitigate #1 by writing it as satire. They'd never notice. If anything you get notes like, "We love that the liberal college professor is having an incestuous relationship with his mother. But we don't want to alienate our demographic. Can he be a cannibal instead?"

My wife and I spent a romantic valentines day at a hotel in Du Pont Circle and environs (I was in grad school at U of MD and my wife was back in GA most of the time). I was living with my Grandmother in Baltimore and the first thing she said when I told her where we were staying was, "watch out for the homosexuals." So yes, Du Pont Circle: still liberal.

Well, okay. These are people who have a right to think what they think, which is that culture can be faked. They've managed to fake commentary, radio, whole organs of opinion; so why shouldn't they think that culture is "culture" and be turned out complete with "footnotes" and "research"* like a Crown or Regnery "bestseller"? All their experience inclines them to think that it can; even more, that it should. All their history tends that way.

They're still gobsmacked with astonishment that they couldn't fake an election and get their "candidate" elected "President", and this sudden fascination with "culture" as opposed to the more traditional conservative simple open fakery is an artifact of that gobsmackedness. They've run into a roadblock, is the way they see it, like Wiley Coyote in a Road Runner cartoon, so, now, again like Wiley Coyote, they feel the need to send away to Acme for something that will save the day.

All the same, the question of whether or not culture can be forged, a la the three-dollar bill, is a matter of opinion. Personally I don't think it can be, but only time will tell.

*'Should we tell them that there's these things called "Director's Commentary" on the DVDs?' — a good question, but an incidental one, for the reasons I have tried to outline above.

does she (horrors) consider them as some sort of role models for her co-generationists?

Who can forget the first rule of Wingnut Politics and the English Language: Always use something like 'co-generationists' when a word that people actually fucking use, like 'peers' or 'contemporaries', will do.

I'm a soon to be sixty six year old guy who also don't have HBO, so I had no idea who this Lena Dunham person was until the wingnuts started nattering on about her, but why can't they just be satisfied that a young person who seems to be hard working enough to create her own show that provides jobs for actors, writers, set designers, craftspeople, and the rest of the support staff required to put a show on HBO. Oh, right... it's not enough that she's a Job Creator, she's gotta have the right attitude, values, and point of view to satisfy the right wing cultural gatekeepers. Y'know what... fuck these people. These ever so culturally underrepresented and put-upon fragile flowers do have their content. Anything done by Don Bellisario in the last thirty years: Magnum PI, Black Sheep Squadron, JAG, and the NCIS franchise (which couldn't exist without Guantanamo Bay as a threat to use against suspects who all seem to be wannabe terrorists) should keep the military pedestal polishers happy. And Blue Bloods, which has a saintly, morally upright, Thomas Aquinas spouting Police Chief of New York City (Tom Selleck) and head of a family of incorruptible cops (and a prosecutor) who live their Catholic family values day in and day out. If the wingers want more, let 'em step up, make the pitches, write the pilots, cast the actors, and see how they shake out. Otherwise, just shut up.

A friend of mine years ago invented a game called "Name That Tune, Mister Spock," in which song titles were given elaborate, technically-correct form. Thus, "Orange Pekoe Brewed Extract Intended for Dyadic Consumption" = Tea For Two, etc.

I totally get that--because its a significant part of the fantasy that men must/always/get/to/choose that a woman who gleefully chooses her own sexual partners and the when, where, and why of it is an ugly whore. Being oversexed and sexually successful makes her ugly. Being oversexed makes her ugly. Being sexually successful and implicitly rejecting any given conservative male by being able to choose for herself makes her downright toxic. If not now then later, for sure--wasn't it that ol' sexpot John Derbyshire who told us that women after 18 or so were by definition not sexually attractive?

I wish to recommend my new personal favorite in the Sexy Girls With Personal Agency sweepstakes: Lost Girl by Canadian ("yes, we can show nudity on TV") TV. Talk about AC/DC and anything goes! They put the Grrrrr back in Grrrrrl power.

I tried the pilot a couple of weeks ago, and...eh. The show's perfectly good, and probably better than average in the Plucky Supernatural Girl Detective genre. It just turns out I don't seem to have any interest in Plucky Supernatural Girl Detectives this winter. Maybe when the weather warms up...

Well, no shit. Her character is a young writer who rarely manages to write anything, and at the time she says that line she is 1. begging her parents for financial support and 2. stoned out of her mind. The only way to think that line is a serious statement by Dunham is to not watch the show.

This is what I thought of when I read "we'll know we're winning when we see the conservative equivalent of Girls." They won't ever see that because they don't allow any wrongthink.

The conservative equivalent of Girls would star sexpots (have to want to see them naked!) with no self-confidence issues (can't show weakness!) who are always successful (because conservatives always are!) and who never ever stray or do anyone wrong, which basically obviates any dramatic structure or humor.

If I acknowledge that Sex and the City got a lot of unfair heat for having female characters with agency, can I still dislike the show for depicting those women with agency as really shallow and obsessed with rich guys and expensive fashion products and living in a Manhattan yuppie fantasy world, and presenting those as basically good things? I have to admit that I only managed to watch maybe three episodes before giving up, and if my impression was wrong I'll be relieved, because it drove me crazy that everyone loved that shit so much.

Isn't 2 Broke Girls about strong independent women, setting up in business for themselves in a capitalist venture and bettering themselves, rather than looking for handouts or marrying a rich man and becoming a home mak...... oooohhhhhh......

Or every Hallmark Christmas show ever made. I saw part of one in which the hero wore a cross, the heroine lived her Christian values, and the basic plot revolved around a hotel that was from a Thomas Kinkade painting. (Literally.)

So your basic conservative movie leaves out all the inconvenient hatred of gays, minorities and women, all the paranoid fear-monging, the spiteful anticipation of the defeat of their enemies, and the gleefull war-monging.

By the way, Girls is produced by rightwing darling Judd Apatow. If they hate the show so much they should have a word with him.

Blackberry and HTC: A Cell Phone Review John D.Rockefeller created the family-run Rockefeller Foundation,in parallel with the birth of the British-inspired Federal Reserve, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation.The Rockefeller Foundation poured money into the occupied German republic for a medical specialty known as "psychiatric genetics." This field applied to psychiatry the concepts of eugenics otherwise known as race purification, race hygiene, or race betterment developed in London's Galton Laboratory and its offshoot Eugenics Societies in England and America. The first International Congress of Eugenics was convened in London in 1912 German general William Draper served as head of Prescott Bush's campaign funding. Draper's grandfather had founded the Pioneer Fund to promote eugenics. http://mla.mrooms.org/user/view.php?id=33297&course=1 That video was eventually sent to people outside the fire department, including the Kempsons. The Kempsons filed a complaint with Spalding county last week. The firefighter who took the video has not been identified, but has been placed on suspension, pending an investigation. The same cannot be said of anti-abortion extremists, white supremacists and right-wing militias, none of which have been subject to special federal legislation singling them out as terrorists as ALF and ELF activists have. Indeed, when the Department of Homeland Security issued a mundane intelligence assessment in 2009 outlining the threat of terrorism from right wing extremists, conservative outrage forced Secretary Napolitano to withdraw it just three months earlier, DHS's release of a similar report detailing cyberterrorism threats from animal rights and environmental activists and anarchists went more or less unnoticed by the media.Take a look at my web-site - reverse phone Lookup

As Salon notes, "Conveniently, New York will see increased security and police vigilance on May 1, following warnings from the FBI and Department of Homeland Security about potential terror risks on the anniversary of Osama Bin Laden's death." Third, as is true for many aspects of poll methodology, pollsters could do a better job disclosing the procedures and methods they use to interview Americans over their cell phones and combine those results with interviews conducted via landline phones. http://is.gd/aRXuXc But two of the three key telephone companies cited by USA Today later started issuing denials they had been involved and on that part of its story, USA Today felt very much alone. Blumberg said this is significant because it counters the perception backed by previous data that cell phone-only households are likelier to be comprised of young, unattached people. The latest numbers suggest that as young people used to living only with cell phones have families, they're keeping their wireless-only habits.My website - reverse cell phone lookup

The only thing I enjoy more than watching conservatives dudes rage about how terrible it is that women are free and enjoying it is being the prime example of someone whose happiness demonstrates All Wrong With The World.

I love how they cannot understand how there are guys in the world who can get a serious and most effective boner for normal looking, flawed women because sexuality is wonderful and complex thing that in actual practice defies the conventions with which conservatives suffocate themselves.

They're working on it. It's that whole "polish our shoes, not get new shoes" or whatever horseshit they've been gabbling about lately. It's never worked - my favorite example was Dumbya sending Karen Hughes around to foreign countries to talk slowly and clearly and explain just how awesome it was that we were destabilizing all of Central Asia and surroundings, if only you'd listen.

Expressing first the caveat that there is nothing on the internet so useless and boring as anonymous/pseudonymous men commenting on the perceived fuckability of famous women, I will say that, yes, Lena Dunham is pretty.

Burke on boobs: "Observe that part of a beautiful woman where she is perhaps the most beautiful, about the neck and breasts; the smoothness; the softness; the easy and insensible swell; the variety of the surface, which is never for the smallest space the same; the deceitful maze, through which the unsteady eye slides giddily, without knowing where to fix or whither it is carried." _On the Sublime and Beautiful_, Part III, Section 15.

but why can't they just be satisfied that a young person who seems to be hard working enough creates her own show that provides jobs for actors, writers, set designers, craftspeople, and the rest of the support staff required to put a show on HBO.

Not to put you down too much (you make a good point) but one thing that people who hate the show often bring up is that all four female leads are the child of someone famous. Personally, I don't care (people are shocked by nepotism in Hollywood) but it feeds into the '20-something hipsters who have never worked a day in their lives' stereotype.

Yeah, I've also only seen her in that Obama ad, which, frankly, I found cutesy and grating rather than cute and clever. And though nothing I've read about Girls - positive or negative - has suggested it's a show that I would enjoy very much, I'm hard-pressed to summon up any outrage that HBO has decided to air Girls rather than a "more deserving" show about a white, middle-aged lone cannon cop whose loose-wolf methods give his captain ulcers but GET RESULTS, DAMN IT!

"Personally, I don't care (people are shocked by nepotism in Hollywood) but it feeds into the '20-something hipsters who have never worked a day in their lives' stereotype."

Sure, but it still doesn't make any sense. Conservatives are supposed to be in favor of nepotism. Conservatives are supposed to believe that talent is mostly genetic, and some of them seem to take that proposition seriously. Adam Bellow wrote a book in praise of nepotism, and the thing runs to 576 pages. He may have kept his own tongue in his cheek throughout every last one of those pages, but he couldn't have answered for those of all his readers. It may be annoying to observe hereditary privilege in action, but if you believe it's the order of nature, it's foolish to yowl about it. You're supposed to find your evolutionary niche and keep to your place instead.

Hell, the Civil War was the last time American soldiers directly fought for American's freedom. The World Wars were much more about helping allies (WWI and European Front of WWII) and clobbering an empire that made a bad mistake in preemptively striking us (Pacific front of WWII).

You can’t talk about Girls at the water cooler with the rest of the office if you haven’t watched it

Back in the mid-1970sm the avant-garde band The Residents had a poster advertising their EP Duck Stab! that read, "You can't talk about The Residents' music if you haven't heard it, and ignorance of your culture is not considered cool."

The difference between The Residents and Schlichter (besides forty years) is that Schlicter is far more obscure and inaccessible.

it gets better as the season goes on. About halfway through season one it starts to reveal a. Good underlying plot. But I will sorrowfully admit that the dialogue makes Buffy the vampire slayer sound like Shakespeare. The characters communicate in a series of impoverished , low rent, Internet style quips and insults which are totally forgettable.

Oh, looks like it didn't take <sarcasm>, either. Anyway, I have no idea. <i> works, and <em> doesn't.

There was once at least one HTML-parsing program for the blind that interpreted <i&gt as marking italicized titles, while <em> indicated italicization for (surprise, surprise) emphasis. I just got into the habit of making the distinction, even though it's probably no longer necessary.

That's a good point. It's such a good point that you make me wonder whether some of the fury of the righteous which gets directed at this show isn't due to the fact that all the leads are female. Nobody bitched when Charlies Sheen took up acting. Nobody crabbed when his brother did the same. Nobody thinks that Michael Douglas had his career handed to him in a big picnic basket — at least, nobody thinks it and says so. Hmmm...